Karen Thompson Walker on Her Debut Novel, The Age of Miracles

Among the things we take for granted: There are 24 hours in a day, the sun rises and sets on schedule, nights are dark, and morning brings light. All this we can count on. So, too, does Julia, the young protagonist of Karen Thompson Walker’s ominous and cinematic new novel, The Age of Miracles (Random House), until a strange phenomenon strikes. The earth begins to rotate more slowly, and with startling, far-reaching consequences. The sun fails to set. Days elongate, stretching into white nights. Gravity is altered; birds fall from the sky; oceans rise; crops fail. People are divided into those who observe the traditional clock and the dissident “real-timers,” who opt instead to live by the now-rare setting of the sun. “The slowing” splinters friendships, marriages, neighborhoods, whole towns; and Julia, armed with her telescope and Walker’s exacting, lucid language, quietly observes the rapidly shifting landscape around her. As the world grows more unhooked from time, she wonders: “Doesn’t every previous era feel like fiction once it’s gone?”

Walker’s debut novel, which she wrote over three years in the mornings before heading to her job as an editor at Simon & Schuster, has already drawn widespread acclaim, earning her a movie deal and comparisons to Alice Sebold’s The Lovely Bones. Walker spoke to Vogue from her home in Brooklyn, where she is now a full-time writer, and was on her way to Edinburgh to deliver a TED (Technology, Entertainment, and Design conference) talk on the subject of fear and the imagination.

What shocked you most in writing The Age of Miracles?
Literally the most surprising thing was when I read about the 2004 earthquake [that caused the tsunami in Indonesia], and came across this fact: that one of the aftereffects was that it shortened our days by a few microseconds. There was something so unsettling and stunning about that, so unexpected and eerie.

So you began with that idea, that image.
I never thought this would turn into a novel; I started it as a short story. I had written other stories . . . but this was the first time I’d written anything with fantastical elements. The opening lines were the same as in the book now, so it always had that voice, a woman looking back on her childhood: Julia and her small family, and the idea of the neighbor living on a different time. And then I set it aside for a while. I’d had the earth speeding up, so days were getting shorter. Slowing the days was a crucial change; I realized that would it make it more haunting, as a novel, something that could slowly unfold.

At one point a classmate says to Julia: “Have you ever done one bad thing in your life?” How much of Julia’s adolescent experience is based on your own?
The specific events are all invented, but her character, her circumstance, was moored to my growing up. I’m an only child, I lived on a cul-de-sac that was a lot like the street that Julia lived on. Being “good” might be the thing I had most in common with her. I concocted the events of the story to evoke some of the feelings I had then . . . but my childhood was much happier than Julia’s, and my family was, too. At the same time, I don’t think I would have I written this book if I hadn’t grown up in California. You have such an awareness of disaster, earthquakes. But while it all feels looming, you also don’t think about it that much. It’s that combination of worrying, yet going on with your life . . . There’s a point at which people stop paying attention to the bad news.
There are so many secrets in The Age of Miracles, one of which was your own: that for three years you were writing this book.
My close friends and family knew, but I didn’t talk about it at work. That was my life, deciding which books to publish, and I wanted to have an identity as an editor there. But I would get up an hour earlier every day and write before I went into the office. I was so used to refining other people’s sentences all day, so I would revise as I wrote, paragraph by paragraph, and through that process, it started to take shape.

What are you working on now?
I feel too superstitious to say very much about [my next novel]. It’s not a sequel, but it definitely has some things in common with The Age of Miracles. I left my job in the fall, and now I can set my life up around writing instead of squeezing writing into my day; it’s amazing to have that time, and I feel very lucky.